The Romney/Ryan Medicare voucher program is a fraud. As Bill Clinton might say, the arithmetic doesn't work.

In 2011, Medicare spent $551 billion on health care for 47.6 million enrollees. That works out to about $11,500 per enrollee.

The Romney/Ryan plan would replace that with a $7500 voucher seniors would use to purchase insurance in the "free market."

They seem to think insurance companies, with their higher administrative overhead, can somehow lose $4000 per enrollee and still have money left over for marketing costs, profits and executive bonuses. Perhaps there is a secret magical fairy dust component they haven't told us about?

And how did they come up with the $7500 figure? Maybe they were sitting around at the 19th hole clubhouse brainstorming and had an intern google up the total U.S. health care spending per-capita on their iPhone. $7500 would have been about right several years ago. In 2011, it was more like $8300.

But even if they proposed a more generous voucher in that amount, it would still fall short. Maybe their intern forgot to mention that seniors have higher health care costs than the population as a whole.